One missing person was a coincidence.
Two missing persons was a pattern, and patterns had explanations, and Liam was going to find the explanation whether or not it wanted to be found.
He stood outside Room 8 with his forehead almost against the door and pushed his awareness through Jade instead. She slipped through the wall without resistance, Nen beast physics being what they were, and began a slow circuit of the interior.
He read the room through her.
Wet marks beside the bed, oval and purposeful, the shape left by someone who sat on the edge without fully settling. The bathroom threshold showed heavier footprints than the rest, the entry point where the door was opened and the first look inside happened. Two choices available at that point: shower immediately, or wait for the aura suppression to lift, so that Blinky could be conjured and clean clothes retrieved from inside it.
Shizuku had chosen to wait. Practical. The footprints said she crossed to the bed, sat down, and stayed there long enough to leave the impression in the damp fibers of the floor. Looking for something to read, most likely. Killing time before the suppression cleared.
Then nothing. No departure path through the wet marks. No shoes by the door. No wet clothes anywhere in the bathroom.
The room was empty in a way that had no sensible middle step.
"Having trouble getting in?"
He turned.
The man in the corridor had blond hair and a suit jacket folded over one arm, the posture of someone arriving home after a long day at an office that did not actually exist. Pariston held a key in his other hand, turning it between his fingers. Room 10, the number visible on its face.
"Or is the person you're looking for simply not there?"
"Do you know something?" Liam asked.
Pariston considered this with the specific warmth of someone who had been asked a question they found more interesting than it appeared. "She really isn't in there," he said, and inserted his own key into the lock of Room 10. The door opened. "Come in and sit down?"
"Are any of the other Nen users here working with you?"
Pariston's expression did not change by any measurable amount. He pushed the door open a little further and waited.
Liam had asked the question because it was worth asking. He did not expect a direct answer and did not receive one. He turned and walked away down the corridor. Behind him, he heard the door of Room 10 close quietly.
He stood at the top of the stairs and thought about what Pariston had said about the breath in Shizuku's room. Not a living person. A clone or a Nen beast.
He let Jade drift back out through the wall and replaced her perspective with his own.
The lobby on the first floor was briefly occupied by someone new. A girl with twin braids and an expression of complete ambient absence stood at the hotel entrance while Morel processed her smoke key into a metal one. She held the converted key and walked inside with the deliberate economy of someone for whom movement was a resource to be allocated rather than expended freely.
Doll-girl. Still sealed, by any visible read. Her aura suppression would last longest of anyone in the building, given what her baseline had registered during the fried rice phase. She moved like someone who had long ago made peace with operating at reduced capacity and had found it acceptable.
Liam passed her in the lobby. She did not acknowledge this. He did not require acknowledgment.
He walked out through the front door.
Morel's voice followed him: "Once you step outside, your previous key is void."
"I know," Liam said, and kept walking.
Morel looked at him from the lounge chair with the expression of a man who had seen candidates do stranger things and would likely see stranger things still before the exam concluded. The large pipe leaned against the wall. The small pipe was in his mouth.
"Chair?" Liam asked.
Morel produced a long exhale through the large pipe. Purple-gray smoke poured out, thickened, and arranged itself into the shape of a recliner with the unhurried precision of someone doing this from memory. It settled behind Liam and held its form.
Liam sat down. It was a good chair.
Below his feet, Jade slipped out from under the hotel wall and dissolved into the lake without a ripple.
He looked at the water. Twenty-odd candidates still active out there, visible as occasional shapes below the surface and intermittent splashes above it.
"There's a hidden level," he said.
Morel took a puff. "If you encounter it, then yes."
"After the hidden level. Does the license get issued there, or does it loop back to the normal track?"
"You'll find out when you encounter it."
Liam thought about this. "Are the other candidates going to object?"
"If they dislike how the Association runs its exams," Morel said, with the flat calm of a man stating weather conditions, "they're welcome to not take the exam."
"Extremely domineering," Liam said, with genuine appreciation.
Morel looked at the lake for a moment. "If you pass," he said, "what kind of Hunter are you planning to be?"
Liam looked at him.
"Netero mentioned you," Morel said. "I got curious. Bounty Hunter? Gourmet? Treasure?"
"I'll figure it out once I have the license."
Morel smiled. A small one. He produced another smoke ring, which rose and became part of the afternoon air, and said nothing further.
They sat like that for half an hour: Liam in the smoke chair, Morel in the lounge chair, the lake spread out in front of them with candidates doing violence to each other over small metal keys. Someone in the water lost a key to someone else. A third candidate took it from the second one before they reached the surface. The cycle continued.
Eventually Liam stood up, stretched both arms above his head, and said: "Time to go."
"Where?" Morel asked, with the tone of someone who already had a reasonable estimate.
Liam did not answer. He held up one finger over his shoulder, aimed at Morel, and walked toward the water.
He had fifty aura.
Fifty aura, pushed entirely into the soles of his feet in a transmutation layer, wind attributes concentrating into a surface pressure against the water's face. Not enough to run on water. Enough to step on water, briefly, if the steps came quickly enough and the aura distribution was exactly right.
He tested the first step at the water's edge.
It held. Barely. The surface dipped under his foot like a very taut membrane and then pushed back.
He committed to the second step before the first could fail.
Then the third.
By the fifth he had the rhythm, and by the tenth he was moving at pace, each footfall leaving a spread of concentric rings behind him as he crossed Hakagon Lake in a series of impacts that looked, from shore, approximately like someone running across the surface of a lake and were, in practice, a very controlled series of near-failures executed faster than failure could complete.
The candidates underwater did not know what to make of this. The ones near the surface definitely stopped what they were doing.
Morel watched from his lounge chair and said nothing.
The reef sat in the center of the lake, a flat shelf of rock barely clearing the water, large enough for one person to sit on comfortably. Machi was on it when Liam arrived, wringing water from her hair, the pink of it darker when wet. She registered his approach while he was still fifty meters out and watched him cross the remaining distance with her arms folded.
"Something wrong?" she asked.
He landed on the reef edge and said nothing.
"What?"
Still nothing. He looked at her with a mild expression and waited.
Machi's eyes narrowed. She stood. The silence stretched between them like something that was taking up more space than the air around them deserved. Four minutes. Possibly four and a half.
Then something changed.
It was subtle. The quality of her stillness shifted. The particular compression that had been sitting around her aura since the fried rice phase released, and the aura underneath it came back up like pressure returning to a sealed system when the seal is removed.
Forty thousand aura, approximately, occupying the space around her properly again.
Liam said: "Your suppression just lifted."
Machi's eyes were sharp and immediate. "Yours hasn't." She moved her fingers, one small gesture, and several threads appeared between her knuckles. "You walked all the way out here while still sealed to stand next to me."
"Worth a try," he said.
"Is it."
Jade came up from the water behind her without sound, sleeves settling in the air as she rose from the lake surface in her light blue Taoist robes, jade mask facing forward. The Yin Nen Sword extended from under her sleeve as she swung it toward Machi's back in a single practiced arc.
Machi's hands moved faster than the swing.
The thread net spread in under a second, a dense interlocking pattern that caught the blade's line of motion and deflected it sideways, the threads holding with the specific tension of Transmutation-type aura that had decades of practice behind it. The sword passed through empty air where Machi had been standing.
Machi was not there anymore.
Liam had been watching carefully. He saw it clearly this time, which was different from before.
The moment she deployed the threads, something else expanded from her body simultaneously. A field, dark and immediate, pressing outward from her center in a radius that lasted less than a second before it contracted inward and swallowed her completely. Not invisible. Present, and then absent. She had stepped into it and the field had closed around her and then there was only the lake and the reef and the threads still dissolving in the air where she had been standing.
He stood on the reef and looked at the water.
After a moment he reached up and pulled the number plate from his chest. Number 42, on its lanyard. He turned it over. Ordinary hard plastic, the kind issued to hundreds of candidates.
He pressed the edges and found the seam.
The plate had a mezzanine inside. Two thin layers with a space between them, and in that space, covering both interior surfaces, fine black marks that he recognized immediately: divine script. Every stroke familiar. The pattern arranged in the compact logic of a Nen ability description, already inked and already partially alive.
Semi-activated.
He thought back to the fried rice room. Thirty spoonfuls. The aura burst. A hundred and forty candidates with their Nen momentarily pulled to the ceiling and then crashed. Every Nen ability in the room briefly operating at maximum.
Including, apparently, whatever was inscribed in his number plate.
The activation condition was obvious once he saw it. The divine script had been written in advance and distributed inside the number plates for every Nen user in the exam. The forced aura burst from Menchi's red seasoning had provided the trigger. Every time a Nen user in the exam released their suppression and used an ability, the inscription moved one step closer to complete.
He stood on a reef in the middle of a lake and looked at the divine script and had a strong, clear feeling about exactly who had designed this part of the exam.
Netero. Scheming old man.